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In my own little world I've found that digital art has destroyed the 'analog' artist in me. Now, this is just me I'm talking about, not the world or even the art world. I am a graphic designer by trade but please don't hold that against me. I used to do a lot of things purely for the sake of artistic expression beyond the confines of my work role. I would make images using my old camera and my own darkroom, or using paint and canvas, or pencil/charcoal/conté and paper, or bits of string and material or clay or welded metal or paper or cat faeces or... whatever worked for me at the time with what I wanted to do. Now I work all day, every day, on a mac and I do a lot of stuff using Poser, Lightwave, Bryce, PhotoShop, FreeHand, Illustrator... anything that will let me easily produce what I've got stuck in my head as quickly and accurately as possible. I now use a digital camera and I mess around with the images in PhotoShop and if I want it to look like a charcoal drawing, well there's a plug-in filter for that. It's not a very GOOD filter but if I manipulate the image on multiple layers and get into layer effects using a bunch of KPT filters and then merge and run the charcoal filter and multiply and blah blah blah it can look pretty damn excellent. It takes ages to come up with a technique that will produce a look I might be happy with. It will be unique because there are so many possible combinations of steps and stages and filters that no two people would ever be likely to do something exactly the same way, but when you've worked it out once you can save it all as a single Action and do it all with one click from then on to any image you care to apply it to
So in theory I should be able to work both ways now, right? If I wanted to create something I should have the option of going either way. The argument is that either method requires an ability to go through whatever artistic processes, both mental and physical, are inate to me as a person and which enable me to be creative. Just as the old argument that anyone can pick up a pencil and put it to paper but only some can actually 'draw' can be applied to art in its most basic definition, then it should also hold true that although anyone can operate a computer, only some will actually be able use it to create 'art' . In this sense I suppose one would have to assume that digital art is no different to non-digital art. It's just a different set of tools.
An ability to draw or paint is a learned thing, to a degree, and artists usually acquire a 'style' that is, in a way, an ability to reproduce actions and interpret an object or a thought onto a physical platform, be it 2 or 3 dimensional. Using a computer is, again, the same in as much as actions are learned and repeatable, except it's not the artist that's doing the repeating. I could paint a hand on a canvas using paints one day and then paint another one the following day but they won't be the same in an infinite number of ways. I could create a hand on my computer one day and do another the following YEAR that is exactly the same in every definable way. If I wanted to go to the trouble of bothering to do it again that is, and why would you when there's a file saved there I can just grab and duplicate? But if I did want to bother, if that became part of the artistic process for me, and I could be bothered getting right down into the numbers level of everything that was involved, I could make something which by any definition was identical to the original.
People would look at the two painted hands and remark on the skill, the emotive brush strokes, the sheer crappiness of them both, or whatever. It doesn't matter. The thing is that it would be obvious that something had been created which they themselves could not have done in quite the same way, if at all. There would be something individual about the pieces that makes them mine, the work of the artist. Those same people would look at the computer versions and realise that computers are bloody clever things, and possibly no more than that.
I have immense respect for anyone who creates anything in any medium, usually. Personally I enjoy working digitally over other methods and it's a hell of a lot easier to make money this way too. It's quicker, cleaner, there's no mess to clean up afterwards. If someone looks at something I've created on screen over my shoulder, or that has spat out of my printer they go "wow" and tell me I'm great. It's a buzz. But if I took that printout, framed it and put it in a gallery next to a painting, they would need to be reminded that there was even a person involved in the digital image at all. They'd admire the artist who created the painting, they'd admire the technology that enabled the digital picture. |
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